After repeatedly begging Congressional Republicans to continue the federal government shutdown, Sean Hannity is ratcheting up his expectations. He encouraged conservatives to leave the government inoperable for up to two months if that's what it takes for Democrats to acquiesce to GOP demands -- advice that would carry devastating effects for the American people.

October 1 marked the first day of a federal government shut down, as House Republicans refuse to fund the government unless Democrats and President Obama agree to significant changes to the three-year-old Affordable Care Act (ACA or "Obamacare").

Fox host Sean Hannity has spent the last year beggingRepublicans to hold America hostage and shut down the government over Obamacare. Now that he's gotten his wish, Hannity is ordering conservatives to keep the government closed, even if it takes "a month or two months." As he told Republican Sen. Rand Paul (KY) on Hannity about the shutdown:

HANNITY: I think the worst outcome, though, for the Republicans in the House at this point -- as they have been reasonable and the president totally unreasonable, Reid unreasonable -- is to cave. I don't think they should give in at all. And if that means that they're going to sit this out for a month or two months, or however long the president wants to be arrogant and not talk to anybody, then just sit it out.

The effects of a protracted government shutdown would be catastrophic.

After only two or three weeks, veterans' disability claims and pension payments to approximately 3.6 million veterans likely won't be paid.

Funding for the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), which gives grants to states for low-income pregnant women, new mothers, and infants, will run dry after one week of a shutdown. WIC, which serves 53 percent of all babies born in the U.S. has contingency funds are available, but they will be exhausted by the end of the month.

Food stamps, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, will run out of money to operate by the end of October if the shutdown is ongoing.

Importantly, this damage would pile on top of the chaos the shutdown immediately caused. After House Republicans forced the government to close, over 800,000 federal workers were furloughed and may not receive pay. National parks and landmarks closed. Many home loans no longer processed and economic growth will slow. The Center for Disease Control will cease some disease-prevention programs and most of the Food and Drug Administration's food-safety operations will end.

Unsurprisingly, Hannity is unconcerned by this impact, as it "doesn't impact [him] mentally."

Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol praised Republican efforts to force congressional staffers to foot the entire cost of their health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA or "Obamacare"), pretending any subsides Congressional staffers receive from their employer would be tantamount to "special treatment."

With the deadline to avoid a federal government shutdown looming, Republican Senator David Vitter (LA) proposed an amendment to the spending bill that would fund the government and avoid a shutdown. His proposal, passed by the House on a 228 - 201 vote, eliminates health care subsidies members of Congress and their staff will receive from their employer, the federal government, to help pay the cost of their coverage under the Obamacare exchanges.

Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol praised the plan as an "extremely strong, political, and substantive" provision during an appearance on the September 30 edition of Fox News' Special Report. Discussing the possibility of a government shutdown, Kristol claimed:

KRISTOL: This is the best political ground for them to fight on ... They are getting rid of the exemption -- the special treatment for congressmen who get special treatment -- better than that of anyone else who's forced into the exchanges.

When host Bret Baier pointed out that even some Republican congressmen disagreed with the measure because they "don't think that their staff should have to feel the pain here," Kristol doubled down:

KRISTOL: I think the House Republicans are intelligent to insist on it, to prevent the Obama administration's change of it and to say, 'I'm sorry, there's no reason Congress or their staffs, nice people though they are, should get a better break than all the other Americans who are being forced into the exchanges under Obamacare.'

The "better break" Kristol cites is actually a special punishment targeted at congressional staff members, a punishment Vitter and House Republicans are fighting to continue.

Fox's Tantaros: "There's Part Of Me ... That Does Want To See Us Feel A Little Bit Of Pain."

Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Andrea Tantaros argued that if House Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling, the resulting default is nothing to be afraid of because, according to Tantaros, the country needs "to feel a little bit of pain."

Congress is currently facing a fast-approaching deadline to increase the nation's borrowing authority and approve funding to run the government beyond September 30. Failure to raise the nation's debt ceiling would cause the U.S. government to default on its legal obligations by the middle of October.

Thus far, House Republicans have indicated they are unwilling to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats acquiesce to a slew of demands, including, as The New York Timesexplained, "a one-year delay of the [Affordable Care Act], a tax overhaul and a broad rollback of environmental regulations."

Fox News has spent this week downplaying the urgency of the upcoming deadline. But two Fox hosts have now taken it further, arguing that failure to raise the debt ceiling wouldn't be so bad and endorsing the resulting default.

On the September 26 edition of Hannity, host Sean Hannity and The Five co-hosts Bob Beckel and Andrea Tantaros discussed whether Republicans would ultimately agree to raise the debt ceiling. When Beckel argued that the Republicans' gambit was too risky because it "puts the full faith and credit of the United States currency in jeopardy," Tantaros disagreed:

TANTAROS: We hear this every time, that a default would be terrible. And it would be. But what's the alternative? To keep spending? That would be terrible as well ... There's part of me, Sean, that does want us to feel a little bit of pain.

Hannity shrugged off Beckel's concern that a US default could "wreck the monetary system of the world":

HANNITY: You know what Bob, I think you overstate -- It sounds a little bit like sequestration. Predictions of doom and gloom, and none of it ever happened. The world isn't collapsing ... I'm really not that afraid of it. It may be naivety.

It would be catastrophic for the United States to follow the Fox hosts' logic and default on our debt. If the debt ceiling is not lifted by October 17, the United States government will be unable to finance the payment of its pre-existing expenses through the continued sale of Treasury bonds. Economists across the board agree this would send the global markets into chaos and send interest rates skyrocketing. Domestically, money for government employees, the military, Social Security, Medicare, food safety inspections, and much, much more could cease or be delayed.

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly unleashed a slew of deceptive and historically inaccurate economic arguments to prop up the narrative that "taxes in America have reached critical mass" under President Obama, whom O'Reilly claimed has redistributed the nation's wealth.

On the September 25 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly ranted about the United State's current tax rates, complaining, "The federal government is getting more tax revenue than ever before and state and local taxes are at the highest level in the history of this country." O'Reilly argued that working Americans are being "punished" by today's tax rates that have "have reached critical mass," adding that President Obama has succeeded in redistributing the nation's wealth from the top to the bottom:

O'REILLY: President Obama and his acolytes do not want Americans to accumulate wealth. They want to take private wealth away from those who have it and give it to those who don't have it. And they have succeeded in doing that with an assist from the Bush administration, which ran up colossal debt after 9/11. Taxes in America have reached critical mass.

Later, when O'Reilly's guest Dr. Jeanne Zaino, a political science professor at Iona College, highlighted historic levels of income inequality and government efforts to mitigate the problem, O'Reilly yelled over her: "Your basic thesis of income inequality is socialism. Don't you get that? The government cannot impose income equality on a private marketplace. It can't."

O'Reilly misfired on several of his arguments. For starters, his focus on total raw tax revenue is deceptive. Total tax revenue rises as the size of the economy and the working population grows -- revenues are comparable only as they relate to the size of the economy, which corrects for this growth.

Under Obama, tax revenues as a share of the economy are historically low. During Obama's first term, the ratio of revenue to GDP averaged 15.4 percent, the lowest levels since 1950, according to data from the Tax Policy Center. For context, since 1950, federal revenue has averaged approximately 18 percent of GDP.

NBC News' Chuck Todd claimed that Congressional Republicans refrained from talking about Benghazi on the one-year anniversary of the attacks -- the statements and actions of at least seven GOP officials on September 11 prove otherwise.

September 11, 2013 marked the twelve-year anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history and the one-year anniversary of the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Over the last year, congressional Republicans and conservative media have formed an echo chamber of lies, smears, and conspiracies related to the Benghazi attacks and the Obama administration's handling of its aftermath.

On Meet the Press the Sunday following the anniversary, NBC News' Chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd claimed that Republicans withheld from discussing Benghazi during the one-year anniversary of the attacks: (emphasis added)

DAVID GREGORY (host): Meanwhile, we're talking about not only twelve years after 9/11, and the Middle East, Benghazi, back as a political focus this week.

TODD: It is. The House Republicans have not dropped this as an issue. They didn't talk about it last week during the one-year anniversary of the Benghazi attack, but this week on Thursday alone, three different hearings are going to be taking place on the same day on Capitol Hill. House Republicans, they don't want to drop this.

But House and Senate Republicans alike jumped at the opportunity to push Benghazi falsehoods on the anniversary of the attacks.

Several elected Republicans took to the friendly airwaves of Fox News on Wednesday, September 11 to politicize the year-old attacks and condemn the president's response. Republican Congressman Frank Wolf (VA) suggested the Obama administration was hampering an investigation into the Benghazi attacks when he spoke on Fox's America Live. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) went on Fox's Your World and complained that the debate over intervention in Syria is a distraction from the Benghazi attacks "where nothing ever occurred to ... bring people to justice." Later, on Fox's On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, both Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) launchedmultiple attacks on Obama to intimate that the administration was not committed to investigating Benghazi.

The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto argued that George Zimmerman was simply "guilty of being male" when he allegedly threatened his estranged wife with violence. Taranto's tweet echoes his established pattern of dismissing acts of violence against women.

George Zimmerman was taken into police custody on September 9 after his estranged wife told 911 emergency operators that Zimmerman had punched her father and was threatening the lives of her and her family. Zimmerman was later released, and his estranged wife has said she will not press charges.

Wall Street Journal editorial board member James Taranto took to his Twitter account to weigh in on the domestic incident. Linking to a Slate article titled, "Shellie Zimmerman Won't Press Charges Against Her Husband. Alleged Domestic Violence Victims Often Don't," Taranto wrote:

Taranto's characterization of the alleged attack and threats maintains his history of offensive comments regarding women. Taranto previously claimed that efforts to address the epidemic of sexual assault in the military amounted to a "war on men" and an "effort to criminalize male sexuality." He also blamed "female sexual freedom" for a "war on men" and called "contemporary feminism" a "sweet deal for hedonistic men."

Taranto has also spoken out against laws that protect women, dismissing the validity of Roe v. Wade and advocating for GOP-backed "life begins at fertilization" legislation. He has called for "a rebalancing of the burden of proof in sexual-harassment cases," because the current legal structure is "highly indulgent of sexual-harassment allegations."

Fox contributor Karl Rove lobbed a line of attack at President Obama during a Fox News Sunday appearance that quickly found its way into a Monday morning Republican press release. While the release was being distributed, Rove returned to Fox to repeat the talking points -- the latest example of Fox News' role as the communication arm of the Republican Party.

Rove, a Fox political analyst, appeared on Fox News Sunday on September 8, where he slammed the president's response to Syria's alleged use of chemical weapons, telling host Chris Wallace, "It's a [sic] amateur hour at the White House."

The next morning, Rove's line popped up as the leadtalking point for the National Republican Senatorial Committee's (NRSC) daily email "Daybreak," reportedly blasted to its listserv with the subject line "Amateur Hour" (albeit with "Amateur" misspelled). In the email, the NRSC charged: (emphasis added)

[O]nce again the country finds itself watching the President fail to rally lawmakers and citizens to his cause. To put it more bluntly, has any other two term President been as ineffective in lobbying Congress and motivating the public to support the initiatives that he wants to see passed? It's amateur hour at the White House.

The same morning, Fox News promoted Rove's "amateur hour" line -- now a Republican talking point -- and invited him on the network to talk about it.

On America's Newsroom, co-host Martha MacCallum introduced Rove by saying, "Karl Rove over the weekend slamming President Obama for failing to get a decision on a Syria attack before leaving for the G-20 summit last week," followed by the clip of Rove saying "It's a [sic] amateur hour at the White House" on Fox News Sunday.

During the segment, while Rove lobbed more criticisms at the president over his handling of Syria, Fox repeated Rove's "amateur hour" statement in on-screen text:

A new study from The New Republic determined that the Drudge Report's use of race-baiting headlines has soared in the last five years, a fact that lends context to the recent flood of conservative media amplifying random, interracial crimes and baselessly assigning them a racial motive.

Matt Drudge's conservative website Drudge Report is infamous for its obsessive coverage of alleged black-on-white crime and race-baiting headlines. But it's only getting worse, according to a new analysis by The New Republic. The magazine analyzed Drudge's use of race-related terms in headlines after 2008 -- the year President Obama established himself as a national figure with his first presidential campaign -- with Drudge headlines before 2008, and the results are striking. According to the analysis, since 2008, Drudge headlines:

Referencing "racism" have more than tripled

With the term "racist" have nearly doubled

Containing "black" and "crime" have quadrupled, and

Have included the n-word eight times, a slur not found in Drudge headlines before 2008.

Notably, the analysis highlighted that Drudge often altered headlines to inject a racial component when the original source contained none. This method of race-baiting has spilled over into the broader media. Recently, conservative outlets have seized upon local crime stories and baselessly assigned them racial motives when no such evidence existed. This spate of reckless race-baiting has been repeatedly accompanied by inapt comparisons to the killing of Trayvon Martin, an attempt to highlight a supposed double standard among civil rights leaders and media figures.

When a video of three teenage students beating up another student on a Florida school bus surfaced in early August, local media reported that the attack was in retaliation for the victim notifying school officials that the three teens tried to sell him drugs. But because the perpetrators happened to be black and the victim white, conservative media broke into a chorus of race-baiting, complaining that civil rights leaders hadn't spoken about the assault. Fox News bragged about its insertion of race into the crime, highlighting that it was the only network to bring race "to the forefront" on the story.

When three teens -- two black, one white -- allegedly shot and killed an Australian college student last month because they were "bored," law enforcement officials emphasized there was no evidence "to indicate that the killing of Christopher Lane was related to either his race or to his nationality."

Undeterred by facts, right-wing media again repeatedlymanufactured a racial motive. Fox argued that the murder was "likely motivated by race" and even criticized other media outlets for "ignoring the race issue" in the crime. Drudge featured photographs of the two black suspects, neglecting to include the photo of their alleged white accomplice.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen dismissed the real-life rape of a minor as "manhandl[ing]" and refused to acknowledge the realities of the sexual misconduct, a longstanding and common practice for Cohen.

In a Post op-ed on September 2, Cohen highlighted singer Miley Cyrus' recent MTV performance where she infamously twerked in order to bring attention to a New Yorkerreport by Ariel Levy on the horrific rape of a minor in Steubenville, OH in August 2012. Cohen euphemistically characterized the victim as being stripped and manhandled:

The first thing you should know about the so-called Steubenville Rape is that this was not a rape involving intercourse. The next thing you should know is that there weren't many young men involved -- just two were convicted. The next thing you should know is that just about everything you do know about the case from TV and the Internet was wrong. One medium fed the other, a vicious circle of rumor, innuendo and just plain lies. It made for marvelous television.

The New Yorker piece was done by Ariel Levy, a gifted writer. When I finished her story, I felt somewhat disconcerted -- unhappily immersed in a teenage culture that was stupid, dirty and so incredibly and obliviously misogynistic that I felt like a visitor to a foreign country. That country, such as it is, exists on the Internet -- in e-mails and tweets and Facebook, which formed itself into a digital lynch mob that demanded the arrest of the innocent for a crime -- gang rape -- that had not been committed. It also turned the victim into a reviled public figure, her name and picture (passed out, drunk) available with a Google query.

And yet what indisputably did happen is troubling enough. A teenage girl, stone-drunk, was stripped and manhandled. She was photographed and the picture passed around. Obviously, she was sexually mistreated. And while many people knew about all of this, no one did anything about it. The girl was dehumanized. As Levy put it, "[T]he teens seemed largely unaware that they'd been involved in a crime." She quoted the Jefferson County prosecutor, Jane Hanlin: "'They don't think that what they've seen is a rape in the classic sense. And if you were to interview a thousand teen-agers before this case started and said, "Is it illegal to take a video of another teenager naked?," I would be astonished if you could find even one who said yes.'"

Illegal is sort of beside the point. Right, proper, nice, respectful, decent -- you choose the word -- is more apt. This is what got me: a teenage culture that was brutal and unfeeling, that treated the young woman as dirt. "'She's deader than O.J.'s wife. She's deader than Caylee Anthony,' " one kid exulted in a YouTube posting. "'They raped her harder than that cop raped Marsellus Wallace in "Pulp Fiction." She is so raped right now.' " Yes, I know, they were all drunk, woozy and disoriented from a tawdry cable TV and celebrity culture.

After bizarrely emphasizing that what happened in Steubenville did not involve rape by intercourse, Cohen later referred to the crime as stripping and manhandling without ever definitively acknowledging that the assault amounted to rape. Of course, an Ohio jury found that the victim was raped and two teens were guilty of the crime.

National Review editor Rich Lowry declared that the civil rights dream of the 1960s has been "won," and thus assertions of ongoing discrimination are "imagined slights and manufactured controversies," a claim that dismisses the current reality of economic inequality and voting rights struggles.

August 28 marked the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington, an event dedicated to calling for civil and economic rights for African-Americans. It was there in 1963 that Dr. King delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech, and the events helped bring about enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. For the anniversary celebration, tens of thousands gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear President Obama and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) - a speaker at the 1963 march - give remarks.

In a Politicoop-ed the next day, National Review editor Rich Lowry used the anniversary celebration as a vehicle to criticize today's civil rights movement as "an intellectually exhausted disgrace" with leaders who are a "degeneration" to the original effort. This is because, according to Lowry, Dr. King's dream "was a glorious triumph" and the fight for equal rights "is won," while today's movement "subsists largely on imagined slights and manufactured controversies unrelated to the welfare of real people."

As evidence of these "manufactured controversies," Lowry mocked the notion that recent voter ID laws are discriminatory and declared: "What the contemporary civil rights establishment can't bring itself to acknowledge is that cultural breakdown has more to do with the struggles of blacks than any officially sanctioned discrimination." He also ignored the continuing problem of economic inequality between whites and African-Americans.

Lowry's dismissal of the discriminatory nature of voter ID laws is illustrative of falsehoods he's pushed in the past. At least 11 percent of American citizens do not possess a government issued photo ID, and the percentage of African-Americans without a photo ID is even higher - one study estimated the number at 25 percent. Even if a state purports to issue an ID for "free," there are costs associated with obtaining one that amount to a poll tax. As the Brennan Center for Justice determined, voter ID laws "create more burdens for minority citizens."

EmilyArrowood
›››

Emily Arrowood is an Associate Research Director at Media Matters. Previously, she worked for the Democratic National Committee. She graduated magna cum laude in Political Science from the University of Tennessee and attended Vanderbilt University Law School.